Why learning is a bodily process

I was watching a lecture by George Lakoff on the Embodiment Hypothesis. In this lecture, he discusses consciousness, saying how "all meaningful thought is embodied".

Basically, Lakoff is saying that if your neural circuits aren't connected to your body - only neurons on the periphery of your brain are connected to the body; the circuits on the interior of the brain are connected only to each other - then you wouldn't be able to think.

That sounds like a radical claim at first, but wait a second.

If you think about it, what Lakoff says is absolutely true.

Your body is what brings sensory information about your surroundings to your brain. If the brain didn't receive any input, it wouldn't have anything to process. Nothing would be learned, no neural circuits strengthened, no memory made, etc.

So the process of learning relies on the physical body and the environment that it's in.

Which brings me to a question that I haven't been able to put into words until now:

WHAT IS WRONG WITH OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM?

That seems like a stupid question to get so stuck on, and you might be wondering, "why the heck was it so hard for you to ask this"?

Most people in America are aware that there are MAJOR flaws in our public school system; we hear talk of how the classrooms aren't structured to meet student's needs, education methods are old and outdated, everything is made so that universities and colleges profit, etc.

(If you haven't seen Prince Ea's I Just Sued the Public School System spoken work poem... well where have you been? Link to the video below.)

But there's this other big problem/question that was rising up at the back of my brain, that I wasn't sure how to address, and it revolves around the fundamental process of learning.

This is where Lakoff's lecture comes in.

So "all meaningful thought is embodied".

Well, if the only way to think, make memories, and learn is linked to the body, why are we forcing students to completely bypass embodiment, instead pushing uncontextualized information into their minds?

It seems counterintuitive.

Our brains aren't boxes in which we can simply store ideas. We cannot shove the theory of relativity into our neurons or ram European history into our cerebrum.

We learn by experiencing the physical world and receiving the sensory information about those experiences from our bodies. And once that sensory information is interpreted, it reinforces neural pathways that ALREADY EXIST.

So if we try to memorize facts and details by reading textbooks, sitting in straight rows, trying to pay attention to what the teacher is saying and not being able to say anything unless we raise our hands, we're not actually learning, are we?

Learning must be structured around physical experience, whether that be simple discussion, doing experiments to apply what we're learning, anything that involves involvement of the body/movement.

And this kind of learning has to begin from a young age, while our brain patterns are still malleable, while we still have lots of neural pathways that can be strengthened.

"When we're born, we have about one hundred billion neurons in our brain, each connected to 1,000 or 10,000 other neural sites. That's about a quadrillion connections. Now get this; by the time we turn 5, about half of those connections have died. The half not used". ~ George Lakoff

This absolutely blew my mind.

What if we could get kids, at an early age, to experience a bunch of different things, strengthen those neural pathways and reinforce them so that the can use them as they get older? What would the effects be? Would the child be smarter? Would they think differently from other children? Or would their brains just be a little larger than average?

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